[ale] feasibility of motherboard & HD replacement in portable, rather than computer replacement ?

[Sean C. McCord]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 03:06:58PM -0500, Courtney Thomas wrote:
> How can I tell if a 7200rpm drive will fit  ?  Are drives for portables like 
> Dell all the same size  ?

All you need to know is whether the interface is PATA (aka IDE) or SATA.

All laptops of that vintage (and the vast majority of laptops of any
vintage) use the 2.5" form factor.  Physical dimensions should not be a
problem.  Likewise, the interface (once the type is specified) is also
standard.

The speed of the drive (whether based on RPM, latency in ms, or whatever
else) does not have any bearing on compaitibility with the infrequent
and usually minor exception of certain SATA1 controllers not working
properly with certain SATA2 drives.

With a laptop that old, you are almost certainly PATA/IDE rather than
SATA, so all you really need to do is make certain the drive you get is
a 2.5" PATA or IDE drive.

When you are looking at the speed options, the general rule of thumb is
that the higher the RPM, the more power and heat, but the higher the
speed.  If you haven't replaced the battery on the laptop, you're
probably only running off of A/C power anyway, so you might just want to
get the fastest (such as 7200rpm) drive whose capacity meets your
requirements.

--
Sean C. McCord
scmlist at cycoresys.com